Tips To Successful Holiday Sharing

When it works, sharing a holiday with friends can be great fun, but many people would agree that it can equally be a quite extra ordinarily stressful experience. To make sure you come back from holiday with friends looking forward to sharing the same enjoyable experience for many years to come, rather than feeling a valued friendship has been irretrievably lost, do some hard thinking beforehand:

• Holidays are precious, and shared holidays need an extra degree of planning to be successful.

• If two of you are planning to go on holiday together, do you know each other well enough to be aware of each other’s tastes and preferences, and to be sure that these will coincide? It’s often said that there’s no better way of getting to know a person than to go on holiday together - but it can be a hard way to find out more about someone!

• If you have any serious doubts, it might be better to go on one of the increasingly popular singles holidays and meet new people in an exciting environment.

• Two families sharing a holiday house abroad can often find this a stressful experience. This is usually because each family has its own ways of doing things, and even the smallest differences in routine can assume an unreasonable importance.

• When there is a group of you on holiday, it’s a good idea to avoid living in each other’s pockets, and instead agree on a degree of friendly independence, to accommodate differences of taste such as: liking to get up late on holiday/wanting to get off to an early start; being more than happy to spend the day lounging on the beach/wanting to see all the sights. If this is properly handled, you will most likely find that everybody adapts and enjoys the holiday much more as a result.

• Money often turns out to be a cause of particular stress on holiday, especially if it is felt that some members of the party are not paying their way. Make sure that money is sensibly yet unobtrusively organized - a simple kitty system may be best.

• If you are self-catering, it may be a good idea to agree to take it in turns to cook, to make this a pleasure rather than a chore, and also to avoid conflicts in the kitchen - a notoriously stressful area!

More Travel Tips